Thursday, December 12, 2013

MORE COMICS THIEVERY

﻿Earlier this week at his Bleeding Cool website, Rich Johnston ranthe incredible report of a guy who stole expensive comic books froma Missisauga (Canada) comic-book shop. The store has the thief oncamera spending close to two hours selecting his ill-gotten booty.You can and should read the entire story at Bleeding Cool, but I’llgive you the short form:

The thief was pissed because he had been turned down by a bank forthe loan he needed to open his own shop. He decided to acquire thedesired funds by robbing an existing shop. He got caught when heput one of the stolen comics up for sale on eBay. He isn’t just acrook. He’s a stupid crook.

That’s where the story took a truly bizarre turn. The idiot thiefbegan posting about his criminal acts and the aftermath on Twitter. He wasn’t sorry about the theft. He was sorry that he got caught. He couldn’t grasp why no one understood why he had to do what hedid and why he was angry. He couldn’t understand why he might goto jail for these crimes. After all, he gave his word - his word -that he would never steal again. Man, did that part of the storybring back some memories of my own dozen years owning and
operating a comics shop.

Digression. The mention of my old comics shop will almost certainlytrigger another absurd and vile outburst from an anonymous cowardwho attempts to post to this blog at least once a month. He’s aspredictable as the sunrise.

In many of Fraidy Cat’s attempted posts, he bleats about the awfulinjustices he believes I did to several Cleveland-area individuals during that time. What all the people he names have in common isthat they were all thieves who stole from me or others and who weresubsequently caught by me or others and who paid a price for theircrimes. Poor babies.

I’m not going to name names because, in the long run, things turnedout pretty good for me and not so good for them. I don’t need togloat. They were the architects of their own fates. I took somemostly minor lumps as the result of their crimes, but those lumpshaven’t prevented me from achieving the incredibly full and happylife I now enjoy. End of digression.

The delusional thief from Canada reminds me of three of the peoplewho stole from me. Their rationales for what they did or why theyshouldn’t have been punished for what they did are, viewed from twodecades or more distance, hilarious. In relating these histories,I’ll withhold all but the most pertinent facts.

There was the individual who embezzled a few thousand dollars from a new business and almost prevented that business from meeting itspayroll and supply obligations. I came to realize he was a guy whowould rather make a dishonest dollar than an honest dollar, a guywho saw himself as a master con artist. When he got caught, whenhe was forced to sell his stock in the business - stock he had notyet paid for - when he was dismissed from the business, he claimedit wasn’t really stealing because he was an owner of the business.He escaped jail as a result of the above, was paid for the stock hehad never paid for and was even given severance pay he surely didnot deserve. For the next decade or so, he tried a number of dumbschemes to try to get revenge on me.

But it wasn’t really stealing, right?

Then there was the employee who admitted he had been stealing comicbooks from my store on a weekly basis. I made it pretty easy forhim because my employees were on the honor system. They got theircomics at my cost and were expected to pay for them when they gottheir weekly paycheck. I never checked on this because, as I havesaid in other bloggy things, I was a lousy businessman.

When the store hit a rough patch, this guy was laid off. I had tocut expenses and he was my least reliable employee. He got angry,threatened me and, later, by way of apology, admitted he had beenstealing comics from me. When I told him his theft contributed tothe store’s financial woes, he was dumbfounded. He assumed I hadfigured employee theft into my budget. I didn’t hire him back when the store’s finances improved.

I should have expected him to steal from me, right?

Then there’s the former employee who wanted to start his own comicsshop. I had turned down his offer to take over my store and pay meout of the doubtless greater profits he would make from the store.But, though the guy had issues like you wouldn’t believe, I wantedhim to succeed and even helped him open his store. I even vouchedfor him with the local distributor and guaranteed his first orders.Because, as noted, I was a lousy businessman.

On a quiet Labor Day weekend - it was a Sunday morning - I drove tomy store to pick up some paperwork. The door was unlocked. WhenI turned on the lights, there was my former employee. As I laterlearned, he had made copies of the store keys before he opened hisown store. He made weekly clandestine trips to the store to stockhis store from my store. When maintenance people from the arcadewhere my store was located saw him in my store, they assumed he wasstill working for me. I’ll never know how much stock he stole fromme during the several weeks this went on.

He was arrested and charged. He pled guilty. He was sentenced toprobation and ordered to pay what amounted to a token restitution.Generous fool that I am, I offered to take the restitution in comicbooks and asked the judge to cut the amount of restitution in half.The judge was amazed by my generosity.

The judge also ordered my former employee to pay (in cash or check)for the three hundred dollars it had cost me to change the locks inmy store. My former employee objected to this and pissed off thejudge by doing so. He ended up having to write me a check on thespot. He was glaring at me the whole time.

The judge offered me the chance to withdraw my earlier generosity,but I declined. I was a lousy...oh, you know the drill.

This is building to a punch line. Just be patient.

It was agreed I would go my former employee’s store on a Sunday toselect a thousand dollars worth of merchandise. The choice of dayand time - when his store was closed - was so his customers wouldnot be aware of what he’d done. This was at my suggestion becauseI was...you know.

When I arrived at the store with a friend, the store was closed andthere was no sign of my former employee. When I called my formeremployee, he informed me he wasn’t going to come to the store andallow me to select my court-ordered restitution.

Remember the embezzler from earlier? He was sitting in a car acrossthe street from the store. As he often did whenever he thought hemight have a shot at me, he had flocked to the side of my thievingformer employee. These two geniuses expected I would lose my cooland vandalize the comics shop. I didn’t. I may have been a lousybusinessman, but I wasn’t that stupid.

Facing his probation being revoked, my former employee did finallyfulfill the court-ordered restitution. Generous idiot that I was,I actually took him out to dinner afterwards and even invited theembezzler along. Because...you know.

My former employee’s rationale for stealing from my store was thathis own store was a money pit from the day he opened it. He felthe could turn that around. Not having to pay for stock would help.He swore he planned to confess eventually and pay me back for allthe merchandise he’d stolen. He had a one-year lease. His storeclosed exactly one year after he’d opened it.

Here’s the punch line I promised...

Several reputable sources told me my former employee often bitchedabout my having pressed charges against him. As he would explainit, he had his late father’s Army knife with him when I caught himin the store that Sunday morning. I saw the knife on a counter andit was a truly nasty piece of cutlery. Had the prosecutor chosen,he could have added a weapons charge to the case.

Anyway...

My former employee would tell people he could have killed me in mystore that morning. I should have been grateful for his not killingme and given him a pass on the charges for not killing me.

Because it would have totally been justified for him to have killedme, right?

A buddy of mine worked at a comic shop many years ago. The shop had a policy for accepting used comics in trade for merchandise. Since the shop also sold candy, they'd get kids bringing in last month's comics to exchange for candy bars.

One time, my buddy says, a couple kids came in with several comics that he knew hadn't been bought at their shop. They all had UPC codes on the cover, and as you'll remember, Tony, back in the '80s, Direct Market comics didn't have the UPC symbol.

My buddy guessed that the comics had been shoplifted from a drugstore or a supermarket or something; but he couldn't prove anything. So what he did was take each comic, one by one, and began copying down the number under the UPC code.

"What are you doing?" the kids asked.

"You see these numbers here? This number is the code for the store the comic was bought at. Sometimes people steal comics, see? And so our policy is to take down the numbers and call the stores to see if they have any missing, as a courtesy."

The kids's eyes got real big. They took their candy. And never came back.